The book tries to examine some of the worst wars and atrocities of
the last century with an eye toward finding
some sort of strategy for making them less likely or not as awful in the next
century. He explores these events from a number of angles — asking how the
people who advocated them came to have their views and how those views became
influential, how the people who participated in them overcame any aversion
they might have had to becoming monsters, and how the way society was
structured encouraged or failed to inhibit the atrocities.

At the same time it tries to uncover examples of people who did take risks to
go against the tide — and to discover what sort of stuff these people were
made of, how they were formed, and what triggered their brave and sadly
unusual acts.

Glover is a philosopher of ethics — and he sees the history of the last
century as a call for ethicists to leave the ivory tower and turn their sights
on practical matters. For this reason, he also asks along the way through his
recounting of bloody history: “what did the philosophers say about all this?”

Which can make for interesting reading. Glover acknowledges that the solutions
to his problem, if there are any, will run the gamut from personal strategies
for fortifying individual conscience through social techniques for encouraging
humane behavior up to methods for preventing large-scale social institutions
like governments from turning psychotic. He is much stronger when talking
about individual ethical decision-making, and fairly weak when discussing
political reform (for instance he can say in the course of a single paragraph
that history teaches that “[t]here is a need for proper policing of the world,
with a legitimate and properly backed international authority to keep the
peace and to protect human rights” and also that “[t]here is a need to avoid
large-scale utopian political projects,” which strikes me as obviously
contradictory — that he doesn’t feel the need to argue otherwise suggests to
me that he hasn’t given enough thought to these political problems.)

But this sort of meaty reading has kept me from scanning the web for yet
another “year end tax advice” article or “government official does something
evil and boneheaded” exposé. There’s been no shortage of either, but you’ll
have to search ’em out yourself, at least until I get back into the flow here
come January.

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